Fiverr CEO explains why everyone needs to upskill with AI
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When your boss tells you AI is coming for your job. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

It's definitely not the kind of message most workers want to see hit their inbox from the higher-ups, but that's exactly what Neha Kauffman, founder and CEO of the freelance platform Fiverr, wrote in an internal memo to his staff last month.

AI is coming for your job. Heck, it's coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call. It doesn't matter if you're a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person.

AI is coming for you. Kaufman has since circulated the note publicly on social media, and he told us his so-called radical candor wasn't intended to make his workers feel doomed. He just wanted to spur them to think creatively about how they can remain relevant in the face of this fast-changing technology. AI is incredibly powerful, but it doesn't mean that it replaces human judgment.

human taste, the ability to come up with innovative ideas and perceptions. And I would like my team to focus on the more complex things. So if you're continuing to do the mundane, the things that

technology can actually automate for you and you continue to do it manually, then you are doing something wrong. Look, AI is extremely powerful, but everybody has AI, which makes it the new standard. It means that no one has an advantage over anyone else because everybody has this technology. So what is your advantage? Being able to know how to use technology in ways that other people don't

Those are the things that are going to set up the successful companies of the future. It seems like a core part of your message is that in this environment, workers need to be more efficient. They need to be able to do more faster, often using these AI tools. But I'm curious if you just think in general that the pie of human work will be smaller. Do you anticipate that we will see, you know, layoffs in industries like yours?

Maybe in the very short future, that might be the case. But the truth is, I don't think that in the mid or far future, this is going to be the case. It's just our...

lack of imagination of what would be the new jobs that are going to be created because of technology. Technology moves so fast. Professions move much slower. But if you think about it, just in the past two years since the introduction of Gen AI and LLMs, there are tens of new professions that appeared.

From, you know, the creation of AI agents, model creations, fine tuning, technology consultants. Now we have vibe coders. There's a study that showed, it was done in 2018, that showed that in 2018, 60% of the jobs that existed did not exist 50 years before. How many jobs...

through generations. You're not going to need less people. You're going to need people for different things. We'll be right back.

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Dip it in all the sauces. Dip it in that hot sauce in your bag. Dip it in your McFlurry. Your dip is your business. McCrispy strips at McDonald's. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Mija Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr. You said that AI is coming for even your job. What did you mean by that? And what are you doing to make yourself relevant?

Well, a lot of the functions of a CEO, whether it's strategizing, creating alignment across the organization, creating process, so many of these things, you can actually use technology. It requires less of my time. And the question is, can I use these tools? Can I automate a lot of the functions that I'm doing

myself, so that I can free up more of my time to do the things that technology cannot replace me with. And so I'm following the same guidelines. And the point I was making is that there isn't any function, at least, you know, in our space, in the high tech industry, that is not going to be affected. And by the way, in a very positive way, because as I've said, AI gives us superpowers.

The question is, can we use those superpowers? So should I become a prompt engineer? Absolutely. Should I use the greatest and latest technologies? Should I take them to their boundaries, to their maximum? Absolutely yes. If I don't do that, I become irrelevant myself.

This memo was mainly originally aimed at the employees of Fiverr, but Fiverr is also a platform for freelancers. Is this message equally relevant to the freelancers who use the Fiverr platform? Absolutely, yes. And I've said that publicly. You know, talking about freelancers in 2025 as if it's a separate group of people is, to me, is funny.

I mean, in five years from now, 50% of the workforce in the U.S. are going to engage in freelancing in some capacity anyway. It's a super valid career. And so if you're a professional and you want to remain relevant and up to date, it is relevant for you as well. By the way, I think that in many ways, freelancers have the advantage over freelancers.

full time employees, just because they don't have the infrastructure that organizations come with, like career planning and knowledge transfer. So by definition, they always need to to upgrade themselves and learn every new thing because this is what keeps them competitive.

And so I think that from that perspective, they actually have an advantage over full climbers in some ways. That was Miha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr.

You can read Miha's full memo on our website, marketplacetech.org. And earlier this year, I reported on how some freelance artists, including those on Fiverr, are embracing AI as part of their workflows. Fiverr now has an AI assistant that can set meetings and ask clients initial questions about their project.

and a creation model that allows artists to train a personalized AI model on their own work, which can be used to generate mock-ups at an early stage of design or to provide lower-cost creations to clients who wouldn't normally be able to afford a professional artist's services. Miha describes the AI tools as, quote, "...another ultra-phase of the industrial revolution because it makes every person into a production house."

Though of course, this raises questions about the technology potentially devaluing human skill as it's literally producing a faster, cheaper product. Daniel Shin produced this episode. I'm Megan McCarty Carino and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM. Hi, this is Rob from London, Ontario. Marketplace is an amazing resource and part of my daily routine.

I get highly credible information delivered in an intelligent, interesting, and at times humorous, but always engaging manner. My day would be lessened without access to Marketplace. Join me in supporting Marketplace with a gift today. Go to marketplace.org slash donate.